Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., who became the 38th president of the United States as a result of some of the most extraordinary events in U.S. history and sought to restore the nation's confidence in the basic institutions of government, has died.
He was 93. His wife, Betty, reported the death in a statement.
“My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age,” Betty Ford said in a brief statement issued from her husband's office in Rancho Mirage, Calif. “His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country.”
The statement did not say where Ford died or give a cause of death. Ford had battled pneumonia in January and underwent two heart treatments - including an angioplasty - in August at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
He was the longest living president, followed by Ronald Reagan, who also died at 93. Ford had been living at his desert home in Rancho Mirage, about 130 miles east of Los Angeles.
Ford was the only occupant of the White House never elected either to the presidency or the vice presidency. A former Republican congressman from Grand Rapids, Mich., he always claimed that his highest ambition was to be speaker of the House of Representatives. He had declined opportunities to run for the Senate and for governor of Michigan.
He was sworn in as president Aug.9, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned as a result of the Watergate scandal.
“The long national nightmare is over,” Ford said in his inaugural address. “I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government, but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad.”
Ford had become vice president Dec.6, 1973, two months after Spiro Agnew pleaded no contest to a tax evasion charge and resigned from the nation's second-highest office. The former Maryland governor was under investigation for accepting bribes and kickbacks.
In the 2 1/2 years of his presidency, Ford ended the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, helped mediate a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Egypt, signed the Helsinki human rights convention with the Soviet Union and traveled to Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East to sign an arms limitation agreement with Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet president.
Ford also sent the Marines to free the crew of the Mayaguez, a U.S. merchant vessel that was captured by Cambodian communists.
On the domestic front, he faced some of the most difficult economic conditions since the Great Depression, with the inflation rate approaching 12 percent. Chronic energy shortages and price increases produced long lines and angry citizens at gas pumps. In the field of civil rights, the sense of optimism that had characterized the 1960s had been replaced by an increasing sense of alienation, particularly in the inner cities. The new president also faced a political landscape in which Democrats held large majorities in both the House and the Senate.
But Ford's overriding priority was ending the constitutional and political crisis known as Watergate. It had begun June 17, 1972, when five operatives of Nixon's re-election campaign were caught breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building.
The White House denied any involvement. But as the situation unfolded, the central question was whether Nixon had tried to obstruct the subsequent investigation. A special prosecutor sought answers on tapes Nixon had made of his Oval Office conversations.
The president resisted turning them over on the ground that this would violate executive privilege, but in July 1974, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled against him. Within days, prosecutors found a tape on which Nixon apparently ordered a coverup. The House judiciary committee approved three articles of impeachment. Faced with the virtual certainty of a trial by the Senate, Nixon resigned.
Ford believed that his signal achievement was healing the national divisiveness caused by the “poisonous wounds” of Watergate, as he put it in his inaugural speech. “There is no question that this is the thing I contributed,” Ford said 30 years later, in an Aug.25, 2004, interview with The Washington Post at his summer home in Beaver Creek, Colo.
When he assumed office, Ford immediately made clear his intention to change what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called “the imperial presidency.”
He was “acutely aware,” he said in his inaugural address, that he had not been elected to the position he held, and he asked Americans “to confirm me as your president with your prayers.” He said he had neither sought the presidency nor made any “secret promises” to attain it.
“In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy at hand. ...
“Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.
“As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the golden rule to our political process and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and hate.”
A new spirit was soon evident in the nation's leadership. The Oval Office, long a fortress for an embittered president who frequently fled its confines to his homes in San Clemente, Calif., or Key Biscayne, Fla., was thrown open to members of Congress, old friends, public officials and reporters.
The president's approval rating reached 71 percent. He was photographed making his own breakfast. He was freely contradicted by his eldest son, and his aides said what was on their mind without waiting for official clearance. In the press office, he appointed Jerald terHorst, a respected Washington correspondent, as his chief spokesman.
This euphoric honeymoon lasted precisely one month.
On Sept. 8, Ford granted Nixon a full pardon for all federal crimes he had “committed or may have committed” when he was in the White House. The only acknowledgement he received in return was a six-paragraph statement from Nixon in San Clemente saying that “I can see clearly now ... that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the stage of judicial proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national tragedy.”
Ford said the pardon was necessary to bring Watergate to a close, that he would have had to pardon Nixon sometime in any case, and that it was easier to do it sooner than later.
The response was a tidal wave of criticism. Every opinion poll showed a large majority of Americans opposed the pardon. It was denounced in Congress, including by members of Ford's own party. Republican officials gloomily and accurately forecast that it had reintroduced the Watergate issue into the 1974 elections, which proved to be a Democratic landslide. TerHorst resigned in protest.
It was widely assumed that Ford had doomed his political career. By January, 1975, his approval rating had plummeted to 36 percent. Not even two assassination attempts, both in California in 1975, generated significant popular support.
The consequences included a three-month delay in confirmation of Ford's choice of former governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York as vice president. In congressional hearings it was disclosed that Rockefeller had made large private gifts to employees on the New York State payroll and that he had played a hidden role in financing a campaign book against Democratic gubernatorial nominee Arthur Goldberg. The disclosures undermined his ability to play an influential role in the Ford administration.
Many conservative Republicans in Congress joined Democrats in opposing Ford's programs. In mid-1975, Gov. Ronald Reagan of California, the darling of the right wing of the GOP, announced his intention to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1976.
Ford beat back the Reagan challenge, but he narrowly lost the general election in November, 1976, to the Democratic candidate, former governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia.
Asked in his 2004 interview with The Washington Post if the pardon had hurt him in the 1976 election, Ford replied: “It probably did. It was a close election, as you know ..... there is a group of bitter people who never forgave me and probably voted against me, and the net result is that they probably helped that I didn't win.”
Ford closed strongly against Carter after trailing by as much as 30 points in the polls but was damaged by asserting during a debate that Poland was not under Soviet domination. Against the advice of aides who told him this was a blunder, Ford stubbornly waited several days before correcting himself. The impression of bumbling was exacerbated by reports of his purported clumsiness. During a trip to Austria he tripped and fell while leaving Air Force One and there were several photographs of him falling while skiing.
But Carter began his own term with a graceful tribute that stands as the general assessment of the Ford presidency: “For myself and for our nation,” he said in his inaugural address, “I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”
Throughout his years in Washington, Ford had a reputation for hard work, patience and self-confidence. These qualities gained him a place in the inner circles of the Congress. He was helped also by the fact that politically he was a man of the center. He was an internationalist in foreign affairs, a moderate on civil rights and social questions and a conservative on fiscal matters.
His standing in the government was evident in 1963 when President Johnson named him to the commission that investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1965, he was elected minority leader of the House, the top Republican position in a Congress controlled by Democrats. He held that post until he became vice president.
When he retired from the White House, Ford wrote his memoirs, established his presidential library at the University of Michigan, served on the boards of various corporations, gave hundreds of speeches, played golf and divided his time between homes in Rancho Mirage, Calif., and Beaver Creek, Colo.
He apparently had no second thoughts about his career. “Once I determine to move, I seldom, if ever, fret,” he wrote in his memoirs. It was one of the most notable aspects of his character and he never wavered from it.
In 1983, he told The Washington Post that losing to Carter “truly hurt,” but that he had been “doing as good a job as possible under very difficult circumstances” and that he was not going to “sit around and cry about it.”
more
AP-NY-12-27-06 0124EST
“My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age,” Betty Ford said in a brief statement issued from her husband's office in Rancho Mirage, Calif. “His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country.”
The statement did not say where Ford died or give a cause of death. Ford had battled pneumonia in January and underwent two heart treatments - including an angioplasty - in August at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
He was the longest living president, followed by Ronald Reagan, who also died at 93. Ford had been living at his desert home in Rancho Mirage, about 130 miles east of Los Angeles.
Ford was the only occupant of the White House never elected either to the presidency or the vice presidency. A former Republican congressman from Grand Rapids, Mich., he always claimed that his highest ambition was to be speaker of the House of Representatives. He had declined opportunities to run for the Senate and for governor of Michigan.
He was sworn in as president Aug.9, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned as a result of the Watergate scandal.
“The long national nightmare is over,” Ford said in his inaugural address. “I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government, but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad.”
Ford had become vice president Dec.6, 1973, two months after Spiro Agnew pleaded no contest to a tax evasion charge and resigned from the nation's second-highest office. The former Maryland governor was under investigation for accepting bribes and kickbacks.
In the 2 1/2 years of his presidency, Ford ended the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, helped mediate a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Egypt, signed the Helsinki human rights convention with the Soviet Union and traveled to Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East to sign an arms limitation agreement with Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet president.
Ford also sent the Marines to free the crew of the Mayaguez, a U.S. merchant vessel that was captured by Cambodian communists.
On the domestic front, he faced some of the most difficult economic conditions since the Great Depression, with the inflation rate approaching 12 percent. Chronic energy shortages and price increases produced long lines and angry citizens at gas pumps. In the field of civil rights, the sense of optimism that had characterized the 1960s had been replaced by an increasing sense of alienation, particularly in the inner cities. The new president also faced a political landscape in which Democrats held large majorities in both the House and the Senate.
But Ford's overriding priority was ending the constitutional and political crisis known as Watergate. It had begun June 17, 1972, when five operatives of Nixon's re-election campaign were caught breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building.
The White House denied any involvement. But as the situation unfolded, the central question was whether Nixon had tried to obstruct the subsequent investigation. A special prosecutor sought answers on tapes Nixon had made of his Oval Office conversations.
The president resisted turning them over on the ground that this would violate executive privilege, but in July 1974, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled against him. Within days, prosecutors found a tape on which Nixon apparently ordered a coverup. The House judiciary committee approved three articles of impeachment. Faced with the virtual certainty of a trial by the Senate, Nixon resigned.
Ford believed that his signal achievement was healing the national divisiveness caused by the “poisonous wounds” of Watergate, as he put it in his inaugural speech. “There is no question that this is the thing I contributed,” Ford said 30 years later, in an Aug.25, 2004, interview with The Washington Post at his summer home in Beaver Creek, Colo.
When he assumed office, Ford immediately made clear his intention to change what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called “the imperial presidency.”
He was “acutely aware,” he said in his inaugural address, that he had not been elected to the position he held, and he asked Americans “to confirm me as your president with your prayers.” He said he had neither sought the presidency nor made any “secret promises” to attain it.
“In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy at hand. ...
“Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.
“As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the golden rule to our political process and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and hate.”
A new spirit was soon evident in the nation's leadership. The Oval Office, long a fortress for an embittered president who frequently fled its confines to his homes in San Clemente, Calif., or Key Biscayne, Fla., was thrown open to members of Congress, old friends, public officials and reporters.
The president's approval rating reached 71 percent. He was photographed making his own breakfast. He was freely contradicted by his eldest son, and his aides said what was on their mind without waiting for official clearance. In the press office, he appointed Jerald terHorst, a respected Washington correspondent, as his chief spokesman.
This euphoric honeymoon lasted precisely one month.
On Sept. 8, Ford granted Nixon a full pardon for all federal crimes he had “committed or may have committed” when he was in the White House. The only acknowledgement he received in return was a six-paragraph statement from Nixon in San Clemente saying that “I can see clearly now ... that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the stage of judicial proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national tragedy.”
Ford said the pardon was necessary to bring Watergate to a close, that he would have had to pardon Nixon sometime in any case, and that it was easier to do it sooner than later.
The response was a tidal wave of criticism. Every opinion poll showed a large majority of Americans opposed the pardon. It was denounced in Congress, including by members of Ford's own party. Republican officials gloomily and accurately forecast that it had reintroduced the Watergate issue into the 1974 elections, which proved to be a Democratic landslide. TerHorst resigned in protest.
It was widely assumed that Ford had doomed his political career. By January, 1975, his approval rating had plummeted to 36 percent. Not even two assassination attempts, both in California in 1975, generated significant popular support.
The consequences included a three-month delay in confirmation of Ford's choice of former governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York as vice president. In congressional hearings it was disclosed that Rockefeller had made large private gifts to employees on the New York State payroll and that he had played a hidden role in financing a campaign book against Democratic gubernatorial nominee Arthur Goldberg. The disclosures undermined his ability to play an influential role in the Ford administration.
Many conservative Republicans in Congress joined Democrats in opposing Ford's programs. In mid-1975, Gov. Ronald Reagan of California, the darling of the right wing of the GOP, announced his intention to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1976.
Ford beat back the Reagan challenge, but he narrowly lost the general election in November, 1976, to the Democratic candidate, former governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia.
Asked in his 2004 interview with The Washington Post if the pardon had hurt him in the 1976 election, Ford replied: “It probably did. It was a close election, as you know ..... there is a group of bitter people who never forgave me and probably voted against me, and the net result is that they probably helped that I didn't win.”
Ford closed strongly against Carter after trailing by as much as 30 points in the polls but was damaged by asserting during a debate that Poland was not under Soviet domination. Against the advice of aides who told him this was a blunder, Ford stubbornly waited several days before correcting himself. The impression of bumbling was exacerbated by reports of his purported clumsiness. During a trip to Austria he tripped and fell while leaving Air Force One and there were several photographs of him falling while skiing.
But Carter began his own term with a graceful tribute that stands as the general assessment of the Ford presidency: “For myself and for our nation,” he said in his inaugural address, “I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”
Throughout his years in Washington, Ford had a reputation for hard work, patience and self-confidence. These qualities gained him a place in the inner circles of the Congress. He was helped also by the fact that politically he was a man of the center. He was an internationalist in foreign affairs, a moderate on civil rights and social questions and a conservative on fiscal matters.
His standing in the government was evident in 1963 when President Johnson named him to the commission that investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1965, he was elected minority leader of the House, the top Republican position in a Congress controlled by Democrats. He held that post until he became vice president.
When he retired from the White House, Ford wrote his memoirs, established his presidential library at the University of Michigan, served on the boards of various corporations, gave hundreds of speeches, played golf and divided his time between homes in Rancho Mirage, Calif., and Beaver Creek, Colo.
He apparently had no second thoughts about his career. “Once I determine to move, I seldom, if ever, fret,” he wrote in his memoirs. It was one of the most notable aspects of his character and he never wavered from it.
In 1983, he told The Washington Post that losing to Carter “truly hurt,” but that he had been “doing as good a job as possible under very difficult circumstances” and that he was not going to “sit around and cry about it.”
more
AP-NY-12-27-06 0124EST
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